"Giorgione is regarded as a unique figure in the history of art: almost no other Western painter has left so few secure works and enjoyed such fame..." Sylvia Ferino-Pagden.

My website, MyGiorgione, now includes my interpretations of Giorgione's "Tempest" as "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt"; his "Three Ages of Man" as "The Encounter of Jesus with the Rich Young Man"; Titian's, "Sacred and Profane Love" as "The Conversion of Mary Magdalen"; and Titian's "Pastoral Concert" as his "Homage to Giorgione".

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

In
recent years the five nude young men in the background of Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo have received as much, if not
more, attention than the Holy Family in the foreground. There would appear to
be no agreement as to who they are or what they represent. Among other things,
they have been variously interpreted as angels without wings, sinners,
penitents awaiting Baptism, figures from pagan antiquity, or figures from the
Old Testament.

In
a paper, entitled “Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo: Holy Family and Family Myth,”
Andree Hayum concentrated on the scene in the background. [i]
She noted the many different interpretations offered for the five nude men, but
found the source in the Old Testament account of the drunkenness of Noah. She
saw an obvious connection between the young men and Michelangelo’s famous
depiction of the Noah story on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.

But if one thinks of them as a constellation
of three, the figures they recall are Michelangelo’s sons of Noah in the
Sistine fresco of Noah’s Drunkenness. The most notable feature of
Michelangelo’s sons of Noah is their nudity.[ii]

Michelangelo: Drunkenness of Noah

In
her interpretation the three men on the viewer’s right in the Doni Tondo would be Noah’s sons
Ham, Seth, and Japheth before the incident of their father’s humiliating drunkenness.
After drinking of the fruit of the vine, Noah had fallen naked into a stupor in
his tent. Ham looked upon his father’s nakedness but the other two averted
their faces and covered him. When Noah awoke and realized what had happened, he
cursed Ham. Hayum argued that the two innocent or sinless sons are therefore
depicted after the episode on the viewer’s left.

There
is a connection between the young John the Baptist in the midground of the Doni Tondo and the story of Noah. Not
only did theologians and artists see the Baptist, the last and greatest of the
Hebrew prophets, as a link between the Old and New Covenants, but also they had
related the story of Noah to Baptism.

In
the First Letter of St. Peter the saving of Noah and his family are seen as
prefiguring Baptism. Just as the waters of the Flood wiped away sin, so too do
the waters of Baptism. There can be no doubt of the prominence of the Noah
story during Michelangelo’s time. Savonarola, his favorite preacher, had given
perhaps his most famous series of sermons on Noah and the Flood right before
the French invasion of Italy in 1494. A couple of years after the completion of
the Doni Tondo Michelangelo featured
the Noah story on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.

Nevertheless,
I have some questions about Hayum’s hypothesis. In the first place, where is
Noah in the Doni Tondo? For Hayum
this question was not a problem because she saw Noah in the figure of St.
Joseph.

As in the sacrifice of Noah, the Holy Family
alludes to Noah and his sibylline daughter-in-law. They have come to rest
holding up the future male child. Like the ritual of sacrifice, the
thanksgiving and the gift are one, and a sense of celebration prevails.[iii]

Noah’s
daughter-in-law was reputed to be a sibyl and given the sibyls in the Sistine
chapel, it was easy for Hayum and others to recognize a sibyl in Mary’s
posture. Nevertheless, I believe it would be impossible to find another reference
to Joseph as Noah. If anything, Noah is a type of Christ, not of St. Joseph.
Noah’s salvation of mankind from destruction at the time of the Flood prefigured
the salvation effected by Christ on the Cross.

My
second question relates to the postures of the nude figures in the Doni Tondo. Rather than participating in
the scene of their father’s drunkenness, they lounge about like modern Italian
men on a street corner ogling passing young women. A similar posture can be
seen in an earlier devotional tondo by Luca Signorelli that is usually called
the Medici Madonna. Hayum and others
have seen a connection between the five nudes in Michelangelo’s tondo and the
four practically nude young men in Signorelli’s painting.

Luca Signorelli: Medici Madonna

In
the foreground of Signorelli’s painting the Madonna sits on the ground while
her son appears to be taking his first step. St. Joseph and John the Baptist
are absent but a bust of the Baptist as a man appears in the fictive frame
above the tondo with a banner reading “Ecce Agnius Dei”. However, the four
young men in Signorelli’s tondo also appear to be idlers. It is hard to see how
they could be the sons of Noah either before or after the incident of his
drunkenness.

I
would like to suggest that the nudes in both paintings are related to the story
of Noah but that they are not his sons. In the Book of Genesis there is a brief
reference to giants upon the earth. Here is an English translation of the
Vulgate Latin.

Now giants (gigantes) were upon the earth in
those days. For after the sons of God went in to the daughters of men, and they
brought forth children, these are the mighty men of old, men of renown.
[Genesis 6:4]

The
Golden Legend embellished the biblical account of the time of Noah.

This time men began to multiply upon the
earth, and the children of God, that is to say of Seth, as religious, saw the
daughters of men, that is to say of Cain, and were overcome by concupiscence
and took them to their wives. This time was so much sin on earth in the sin of
lechery, which was misused against nature, wherefore God was displeased…

A
fuller account can be found in the apocryphal legends of the Jews.

Unlike Istehar, the pious maiden, Naamah, the lovely sister of
Tubal-cain, led the angels astray with her beauty, and from her union with
Shamdon sprang the devil Asmodeus. She was as shameless as all the other
descendants of Cain, and as prone to bestial indulgences. Cainite women and
Cainite men alike were in the habit of walking abroad naked, and they gave
themselves up to every conceivable manner of lewd practices. Of such were the
women whose beauty and sensual charms tempted the angels from the path of
virtue. The angels, on the other hand, no sooner had they rebelled against God
and descended to earth than they lost their transcendental qualities, and were
invested with sublunary bodies, so that a union with the daughters of men
became possible. The offspring of these alliances between the angels and the
Cainite women were the giants, known for their strength and their sinfulness…[iv]

The legends of the Jews ascribed a
number of names to these giants but one was Nephilim, “because bringing the
world to its fall, they themselves fell.” The modern Jerusalem bible does use
the word Nephilim instead of giants to describe these troublemakers whose sins
were so great that it took a flood to wipe them out. In addition to walking
about naked, the Nephilim were noted for their arrogance and wantonness.

They knew neither toil nor care, and as a consequence of their
extraordinary prosperity they grew insolent. In their arrogance they rose up
against God…. It was their care-free life that gave them space and leisure for
their infamies.[v]

The description of the Nephilim in the
Jewish legends fits the depiction of the nude young men in the background of
both Signorelli’s Medici Madonna and
Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo. The
painter of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel certainly had knowledge of the
Book of Genesis. Scholars have demonstrated that he could have read the text in
Italian because of the publication of the Malerbi bible in 1490 in the vernacular.
He obviously used the Malerbi woodcuts in his work in the Sistine chapel.

Could he have been familiar with the
folklore and legends of the Jews? Michelangelo grew up in a Florence that was a
center of Hebraic studies.Michelangelo
trained at the Medici court where Pico della Mirandola was known for his
knowledge of the Hebrew lore and traditions that were all lumped together under
the heading of Cabala. Most of
Savonarola’s sermons were based on the books of the Old Testament. Also, Sante
Pagnini, who succeeded Savonarola as Prior of San Marco, was a Dominican
specialist in Hebrew language and grammar. He spent practically his entire career translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Latin.

Why would Michelangelo place the proud
giants or Nephilim in the Doni tondo? I can only offer the following guess. The
painting is a devotional image. The Madonna elevates her infant Son in the way
a priest elevates the Host at Mass. John the Baptist looks at the Host and
utters the words of the Agnus Dei: Behold the Lamb of God…. But the full
version of the ancient prayer is “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the
sins of the world, have mercy on us.”

The Nephilim represent the sins of the
world. I suggest that they are the nudes in the background of both the Doni Tondo and Signorelli’s Medici
Madonna. In both paintings the Madonna and Child have turned their backs to
the nudes in the background. Instead of a Flood, the Lord has sent his only Son to take away the sins of the world.

###

[i] Andree
Hayum, Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo: Holy Family and Family Myth. Reprinted in Michelangelo, Selected Scholarship in
English, edited with Introduction by William E. Wallace, New York and
London, 1995, V. 1.Life and Early Works, p. 421.

Friday, July 3, 2015

In
the Doni Tondo Michelangelo placed
the Holy Family outside in a landscape. He used the setting of one of the most
popular legendary subjects of the day, the encounter of the Holy Family with
the infant John the Baptist on the return from their sojourn in Egypt. Obviously,
the infant John had also been saved from the murderous designs of King Herod.
While the Holy Family had fled to the safety of Egypt, popular legends
recounted the escape of the Baptist and his mother Elizabeth by taking refuge
in a desert cave or grotto.

Scripture
does not record how long the Holy Family remained in Egypt but the legends
claimed that when they finally did return to Judea, they encountered the young
John the Baptist in the desert. The significance of the meeting was not lost on
theologians, ordinary folk, and the artists who found a ready market for
paintings of the meeting of the two infants.

The
meeting in the desert was regarded as a precursor of the meeting at the Jordan
some thirty years later that marked the beginning of the public life of Jesus.
At the Baptism of Jesus, John had proclaimed, “behold the lamb of God”, a
prophecy of the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. When artists
portrayed the two infants meeting and sometimes embracing in the desert, they
were depicting the acceptance by Jesus of his sacrificial mission.

Leonardo’s
so-called “Madonna of the Rocks” is a good example of the encounter with the
young John the Baptist. Leonardo placed the meeting in the cave or grotto in
which the Baptist and his mother Elizabeth took refuge. One version, now in
London, even depicts the Baptist showing the little cross to the infant Jesus.

Leonardo’s
equally famous depiction of Mary, her mother Anne, and the two young boys is
also a version of the encounter in the desert. In the original cartoon Leonardo
included the two boys but he substituted a lamb for the Baptist in the final
version. Leonardo exhibited the cartoon on his return to Florence shortly
before Michelangelo began working on the Doni
Tondo but Michelangelo finished his painting before the completion of
Leonardo’s final version.

In
Michelangelo’s tondo the young John does not embrace or gambol with Jesus.
Neither does he cozy up with the Holy Family or even join up with the group as
he does in so many depictions. He stands behind or leans on a parapet that
separates him from the Holy Family as if he were a member of a congregation. As
Mary elevates her Child, it is as if John is observing the elevation of the
Host at Mass. His words, “Behold the Lamb of God”, form part of the “Agnus
Dei”, one of the most ancient prayers of the Mass.

The
sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross was reenacted at every Mass. When the priest
elevated the Host at the Consecration, the congregation could not only see the
Host but also a crucifix on the wall above or hung on the altar screen. It is
difficult to know what went through an ordinary person’s mind at that point in
the Mass. Early in the twentieth century Pope Pius X urged Catholics not to bow
in reverence but to look upon the elevated Host and say to themselves the words
of doubting Thomas, “my Lord and my God.” But during the Renaissance we most
likely have to turn to the artists for the answer. When John the Baptist
approached Jesus either as a child in the desert or at the Jordan years later,
his words, “behold the Lamb of God” called to mind the elevation of the Host at
the Consecration.

There are points of comparison between Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo and an earlier Florentine
tondo by Luca Signorelli commonly called the Medici Madonna but actually a depiction of the return from Egypt.
In the foreground the Madonna sits on the ground while her son appears to be
taking his first step. St. Joseph is absent but a bust of John the Baptist as a
man appears in the fictive frame above the tondo. Beneath the bust is a banner
with the words “Ecce Agnius Dei”.

Luca Signorelli: Medici Madonna

Most
scholars have noted that Michelangelo placed the Baptist in the midground of
the Doni Tondo as a link between the
Holy Family in the foreground and the five nude young men in the background of
the Doni Tondo. It has been argued
that the Baptist, the last and greatest of the Hebrew prophets, acts as a link
between the Old and New Covenants.

In
the background of the Signorelli tondo mentioned above there are also some
practically nude young men in various poses. It has been argued that
Michelangelo must have been aware of the Signorelli Medici Madonna. But in each case who are these nude young men, or what
do they represent? This question is the one that seems to absorb modern
scholarship the most, and I will turn to it in my next post.